The diary of a dedicated Ubuntu user that lucked into his dream job working on the Ubuntu team.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Closing the Photobomb Chapter, and Now Back To Quickly Widgets

Last week I stopped blogging because I was hanging with the Ubuntu Platform team at our every-mid cycle "release sprint". I didn't have any free time, too busy, so no time to blog.

However, just because I wasn't blogging, doesn't I haven't been getting some work done on my projects.

PhotobombFirst, I did some work on photobomb, but using the new gwibber widget that kenvandine created. As you can see, it's much nicer looking, but also has built in protocol selectors. It's the same widget that Gwibber uses, in fact.

The code is much nicer as well. I deleted all of my code for displaying the widget and replaced it with this:

Just create a poster object and add it to your window or dialog. Sweeeeet! FTW! If you want to add the ability to broadcast to your app, that's it, literally a few lines of code.

QuidgetsCreating Photobomb has been fun, but it's time for me to turn my attention back to Quidgets for a while.

First thing is, Quidgets is no longer "Quidgets". It is now "Quickly Widgets", because it is in the package "quickly-widgets" which is now available in Universe, thanks to didrocks. The launchpad project is still called "Quidgets", but I'll probably change that soon as well.

In any case, I've been spending my extra time the last couple of days porting CouchGrid to Quickly Widgets. And by this I mean CouchGrid is now a subclass of DictionaryGrid and is part of the Quickly Widgets library. Deriiving CouchGrid from DictionaryGrid was a lot of work but it has a huge benefit. All the automagic persistence of CouchGrid, with all the Goodness of DictionaryGrid. So here's the test up showing that CouchGrid now handles all the same column types DictionaryGrid handles.I haven't tested it with GridFilters yet, but it's good to save something for tomorrow night :) I had to change the internals of DictionaryGrid a bit, so I hope that apps that use it won't break when I update it. I'll test it out a bit first and see.

Next UpNow that CouchGrid is substantially done, there is *a lot* of work I would like to do on the Quickly Widgets library. However, before I embark on that, I think it's time to document Quickly Widgets really well. I have had some thoughts about how to design the library (and some changes that causes) and also to document it. I'm thinking about doing a "document a day" kind of thing, where I document one part of the Quickly Widgets library each day.

While I was at the sprint Brian Murray demoed Bughugger to the platform team. The #1 request was for an offline mode. Well, seems that CouchGrid is perfect for that, and since a CouchGrid is really just a special DictionaryGrid, it should be pretty easy for me to add that capability. But I think I'll do the documentation first.